“Clearly Separate Governance Issues and Business” – Financial News
While the management dispute within Hanmi Pharmaceutical Group is ongoing, an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting was held on the 19th. Park Jae-hyun, CEO of Hanmi Pharmaceutical, stated that the meeting is a critical moment where shareholders decide whether Hanmi Pharmaceutical advances globally or reverts to the past. He emphasized it as a day to clearly separate the group governance issues from Hanmi Pharmaceutical’s business while focusing efforts on enhancing shareholder value.
Park noted, “In the past two years, Hanmi Pharmaceutical has achieved tangible results across fields encompassing sales, marketing, improved and compound new drugs, and innovative new drugs, as well as research on production processes and formulation technologies for bio and synthetic pharmaceuticals, leading the Korean pharmaceutical and bio industry.”
He added, “All executives at Hanmi Pharmaceutical deeply contemplate what Hanmi alone can excel at and what only Hanmi can do, striving for excellence across all business aspects. We will push forward unshaken by any internal or external circumstances, meeting the support and expectations of our shareholders while working tirelessly to enhance the company’s value.”
During the meeting, there was a vote on dismissing CEO Park Jae-hyun and non-executive director Shin Dong-guk, chairman of Hanyang Precision, pitting the brother faction (Im Jong-yoon, an inside director, and Im Jong-hoon, CEO of Hanmi Science) against the four-party alliance (Song Young-sook, chairman of Hanmi Pharmaceutical Group, and her daughter Im Ju-hyun, vice chairman of Hanmi Pharmaceutical, along with Shin and Killington LLC).
The agenda comprised four items: the dismissal of inside director Park Jae-hyun; the dismissal of non-executive director Shin Dong-guk; the appointment of inside director Park Jun-seok, vice president of Hanmi Science; and the appointment of inside director Jang Young-gil, CEO of Hanmi Fine Chemical.
Hanmi Pharmaceutical’s board of directors consists of 10 members, with the brother faction holding 4 seats and the mother-daughter faction 6 seats. The brother faction aims to dominate Hanmi Pharmaceutical’s board by dismissing CEO Park and Chairman Shin, and appointing Vice President Park and CEO Jang during this shareholders’ meeting.
Hanmi Science, which acts as a holding company and is controlled by the brother faction, holds over 41% of Hanmi Pharmaceutical’s shares. Meanwhile, Shin, Hanyang Precision, and the National Pension Service, which sided with the four-party alliance for this meeting, control a 20% stake, leaving the decision ultimately up to the approximately 40% shareholding of minority stakeholders.
The extraordinary shareholders’ meeting of Hanmi Pharmaceutical was scheduled to start at 10 AM but was delayed for about 30 minutes due to issues related to the collection of proxies, eventually beginning at 10:33 AM.